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Hi All, Myself and 2 neighbours have internet accounts and obviously pay 3 seperate charges, is there any reason why i couldn't or shouldn't offer them a connection, to my router and we share the cost for the one account?

The biggest risk for you is that one of your neighbours decides to do something illegal on the internet. If you're the bill payer, then it will be your front door that gets kicked down by the police at 6 in the morning.

Other than that, you'd need an unlimited plan, and would have to accept that your download speed would be shared with others at peak times. How much that would affect you would depend on what speed you get and what you do with it.

You should be OK with the BT WiFi connection. The Home Hub maintains a separate connection to BT's servers for people logging on that way, and they are given a completely separate IP address from your home network.

So if BT are informed of illegal activity, they can work out that it was a BT WiFi connection, and check who was logged in at the time.

But any traffic from your home network is channeled through your Home Hub's normal IP address, so to the outside World, it all appears to come from the same place.

BT Fon and WiFi Hotspots are subject to an agreement between the person who signed the contract (the customer) with - and is controlled by - BT.

The issue of improper use is then the responsibility of the other users - who, it must be noted, can only use BT Fon and WiFi Hotspots if they also have a contract with BT either by being existing BT Broadband customers or by having agreed to the BT pay-as-you-go terms and conditions for casual use - and is therefore "policed" by BT (in fact probably via Ofcom).

You, as the person who signs the contract with BT, are responsible for what you and anyone else you allow to access your BT Broadband uses that broadband for. If you allow anyone to transfer enough data that you exceed your monthly limit , take part in any inappropriate activity or BT deem that you are not complying with their definition of "fair usage", then that is soley your responsibility.

However if you opt-in (or do not opt-out) of BT Fon, then you are not responsible for that part of your data bandwidth which BT partition off from your nominal bandwidth.

The amount of data transferred, as opposed to the data rate, has no bearing on your contracted monthly allowance whatever that may be. It does not affect your contractual agreement to "fair usage".

The amount of data transferred and the data rate of BT Fon etc. is entirely under the control of BT.

For example, suppose that before you opt-in to BT Fon, you have a 10GB monthly allowance and have a nominal data rate of 10Mbps.

If you live in an urban area where there may be lots of casual users, after you opt-in to BT Fon, you may find that your nominal data rate has dropped to 9Mbps. The missing 1Mbps is being shared out amongst the casual users.

If you live in the country where you may have few or distant neighbours then you may find that your nominal datarate rarely drops below your original 10Mbps because there are so few casual users.

In either case you will see no change to your monthly allowance (except that it may take a little longer for you to reach it because your pipe may only be capable of carrying 0.9 times the data rate it used to).

You have no responsibility for what those casual users do with that 1Mbps because it is no longer "yours".

However, noting ectophile's comment about the casual user's apparent IP address being that of your Home Hub, if you live in the middle of nowhere and so are very unlikely to have anyone actually using your BT Fon connection without your knowlwedge, you may have some difficulty explaining any violations or improper usage of BT Fon.

It may make for interesting cases amongst places like B&B's, remote pubs and perhaps youth hostels but then maybe they should be on some sort of commercial contract anyway ...

Another isuue that hasn't yet been comment on is network sniffing and cookie hijacking, both of which are very easy to do.

Not only by allowing somebody to use your connection would they have potential access to all devices on your home network, using software such as wireshark they can 'listen' to all traffic coming from your pc and pick up passwords, login details etc.

Definitly not reccomended, you could be really opening yourself up to identity theft.

You will almost certainly find that your ISP has some small print in the paperwork about sharing your connection with people not living in your house is breach of their contract. This also extends down to operating an unsecured wireless router.

I think you are making the right choice by rather passing up on this opportunity to save a bit of cash.

While all the points above are well made, they are all the technical considerations.

I, for one, would be hesitant to share my connection with someone else, just for the sake of not making things uncomfortable when payment is late, or not forthcoming.

When you do cut them off? Or do you just let them use it, and listen to someone making 'promises' about it being next month time again.

I think all of the above posts are enough reason to not consider doing this, but I think you would find most problems in this type of scenario is likely to be more of a inter-person nature, than a technical nature.

Well i don't think it has much big problem because i am also sharing with 4 people but what i have done i have installed frominternet experts who installed router and other internet connection setting at my home.